Why a COVID contact-tracing app is unlikely to be effective in the UK

COVID and Digital Contact Tracing

While some countries have rolled out smartphone apps to track citizen’s movements and health status, the UK government has announced their plans to develop and roll out a similar contact-tracing app. However, a COVID contact-tracing app in the UK raises the spectre of more problems than it has the potential to solve.

China was an early adopter of a location and health status tracking app, making it mandatory for everyone to install and reportedly sharing people’s movements with the police. However, the overall Chinese approach to quarantine and tracking has been authoritarian, and lack of reliable data from China makes it difficult to ascertain which methods have been effective in limiting the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Outside of an authoritarian state like China, it is difficult to get sufficient user participation on a smartphone app to make a meaningful impact on contact tracing. While the UK is aiming for at least 50% of the population to use a contact-tracing app, in countries where a contact-tracing app is already available and voluntary like Singapore, only 12% of people use it.

Assuming 12% of the population use a contact-tracing app (which might be optimistic for the UK), that means the statistical likelihood of two people passing by each other and both having the app is 1.44%.

Of course, Google and Apple said they could just automatically install the software on everyone’s phones, just like when Apple automatically put that U2 album on everyone’s iPhone in 2014.

But the problem with Bluetooth contact tracing is that it is not consistent with a virus’ possible infectivity range. Two people’s Bluetooth phone contact may not be limited to 6 feet, and Bluetooth easily passes through physical barriers like walls and ceilings. That means it is likely to miss most of the potential infection vectors as well as potentially giving a huge number of false positives.

Effectiveness requires large-scale testing

One of the key points to learn from South Korea is that contact-tracing relies on widely available testing. A prerequisite of success for any contact-tracing app would be free or affordable COVID testing being widely available to the entire population. Accessible and affordable coronavirus testing must be available nationally prior to the use of a national contact tracing app, otherwise it is just unchecked surveillance without the capability to provide sufficient or valid information to its’ users or public health bodies.

And while the UK is far behind its COVID testing goal of 100,000 tests per day, this target is still nowhere near the required testing capacity to make a contact tracing app effective.

Data protection and privacy

Another problem with a potential contact tracing app is with data protection and privacy. A draft memo from the UK government has already indicated that a contact-tracing app has the potential to ‘de-anonymise’ the data and allow government departments to identify people and their smartphones.

If it is possible to ‘de-anonymise’ data, that means the data was never anonymous in the first place. The definition of anonymity is that it is impossible to identify someone from their data, but a contact tracing app risks compromising a substantial amount of people’s private data.

And there has been a history of problems, failures and data beaches from the UK government and  associated public sector bodies. Over the past years the UK government has lost everything from NHS patient data, the security details for Heathrow airport, contact lists of journalists, police witness lists, the Queen’s travel and security schedules, and nuclear power plant safety assessments to name a few.

The risks associated with storing the location history and health status of every person in the country are huge, while the government’s history on data protection should not be reassuring. Without convincing evidence that: a) the app would be effective; and b) sufficient privacy and data protection  measures are in place, the app is not a realistic or an useful solution.

Current contact tracing is effective

General tracking of the population using smartphone movements and location data is already available. Public health authorities could use anonymised data that is already collected by companies like Google and Facebook to track general movement patterns across the country. This already exists, and could be made available for use by public health authorities to track patterns of movement and potential virus transmission.

In my latest book, Myths of Social Media I analysed and published my personal location history to show how location-tracking technology is already done using existing technology, but also to show the potential problems associated with collecting this kind of data.

It’s a good idea to explore the range of options that could be used to combat COVID 19 and ease up the restrictions on people’s movement. However a government-run contact tracing app is unlikely to be a desirable or effective option.

The good news is that public health bodies are already very good at contact tracing using conventional methods. They have a great deal of experience from decades of treating and contract-tracing the spread of infectious diseases, particularly sexually transmitted diseases. They need the support, personnel and resources to use already existing and demonstrably effective practices.

Not yet a viable digital option

Without an accurate, accessible and affordable national coronavirus testing infrastructure, a tracking app will at best have limited efficacy and at worst can give people a false sense of security – leading to another wave of infections.

If not properly managed (and the UK government does not have a great track record on rolling out digital technologies) it creates the risk for more abuses and greater vulnerability in the population than existed before.

Experimenting with untested digital technology and wide expansions of government powers during a crisis does not always lead to the desired outcome. We must be cautious.

Ian MacRae is the Head of Workplace Psychology at Clear Review and author of five books on workplace psychology, including his most recent book Myths of Social Media: Dismiss the misconceptions and use social media effectively in business.

More about Irish Tech News and Business Showcase here

FYI the ROI for you is => Irish Tech News now gets over 1.5 million monthly views, and up to 900k monthly unique visitors, from over 160 countries. We have over 860,000 relevant followers on Twitter on our various accounts & were recently described as Ireland’s leading online tech news site and Ireland’s answer to TechCrunch, so we can offer you a good audience!

Since introducing desktop notifications a short time ago, which notify readers directly in their browser of new articles being published, over 30,000 people have now signed up to receive them ensuring they are instantly kept up to date on all our latest content. Desktop notifications offer a unique method of serving content directly to verified readers and bypass the issue of content getting lost in people’s crowded news feeds.

Drop us a line if you want to be featured, guest post, suggest a possible interview, or just let us know what you would like to see more of in our future articles. We’re always open to new and interesting suggestions for informative and different articles. Contact us, by email, twitter or whatever social media works for you and hopefully we can share your story too and reach our global audience.

Irish Tech News

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie or on Twitter: @SimonCocking